NATO prepares for a new, futuristic war

NATO’s Operation Locked Shields, an international military exercise the military alliance conducted last month, was different from trasditional war games. There were no bullets, tanks, aircraft, ships, or camouflage face-paint. The troops involved in the exercise spent most of their time in air-conditioned rooms within a high security military base in Estonia. The exercise, a window into what a future war would look like, had one team of IT specialists detailed to attack nine other teams, located in different parts of Europe. The IT experts, working from their terminals in the Nato Co-operative Cyber Defense Center of Excellence, created viruses, worms, Trojan Horses, and other Internet attacks, aiming to hijack and extract data from the computers of their “enemies.”